Crabbing

Last night we got a call from the only crabbing company in the Nelson area. They told us we could go on the next trip with them in the morning. I was so excited!
This morning dad woke me up at six. We snuck out of the house and got in the car. An hour later we arrived at the dock and met our captain.
When we came to the first pot the captain steered the boat next to the buoy while the first mate grabbed it. Then he would hand the rope to the captain who put it on a pulley that pulled it up out of the ocean. When the pot was on the boat the first mate separated the keepers from the little ones. Keepers were ninety centimeters or bigger. After he threw the little ones back into the sea he re-baited the trap and tossed it back. This was done over and over again. Sixty-five times!
If a trap was not doing too well they would move it to a new spot. Each good pot had about fifty crabs in it and twenty percent of them were big enough to keep. Most pots had a piece of zinc in it to keep the pot from rusting. After sixty-five pots we had about eighty kilos of good crabs. All the crab was processed so they made about One Thousand Four Hundred dollars. The captain gave us five crabs and a big snapper that we found in one of the pots. I learned a lot!

One kilo of crab per pot would end up in an ok day. Twenty-five percent of a crab's body is the meat. Today we got about twenty kilos of crab meat. One kilo of crab meat is worth seventy dollars. One kilo of live crabs is ten dollars.